Nexus 5 has a battery drain bug on current L Preview, is this holding up the final images?

While many of us were hoping for Lollipop images for our existing Nexus devices earlier this week, Google has so far kept us in the dark as to exactly when they might arrive. There are many theories as to what is going on. Some say that Google simply isn’t releasing the images until after the Nexus 6 ships. We’ve also heard rumors about how bugs might be keeping Google from rolling out the images.

Is there any real evidence to support the latter claim? Possibly. Taking a look at the Google bug tracker, it seems the latest Android L Developer Preview has a bug that impacts battery life for the Nexus 5. Google’s Trevor Johns notes that Google is aware of the issue and is working on the problem:

Android Engineering is aware of an issue affecting Nexus 5 users running Android 5.0 which causes significant ‘Miscellaneous’ battery usage while WiFi is enabled. This appears to be caused by an abnormally high number of IRQ wakeup events. We are continuing to investigate this issue.

It’s really hard to say whether or not this bug is holding Google back from releasing the images. Especially since the rumor mill originally said they would release the tablet images first, and this bug doesn’t seem to be present on either the Nexus 7 (2012/2013) or Nexus 10. At least we’ve yet to see anyone with a Nexus tablet or Nexus 4 report on the issue. Of course, if there’s one serious bug still possibly around — there could be several more.

Either way, we’ll get the images eventually. For now, we just have to be patient and happy in the knowledge that Lollipop is almost upon us. What are you most looking forward to from Lollipop? Let us know in the comments.